Notes on Lorenzo Magnani Understanding Violence: The intertwining of morality, religion and violence: a philosophical stance. Springer-Verlag, Berlin-Heidelberg, 2011, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-21972-6

Lorenzo Magnani’s book is a broad and deep meditation on the theme of violence. For the author, the theoretical and methodological problem lies not in trying to find a privileged access to the issue of violence, but rather to raise this issue to the status of an independent, chiefly philosophical subject. This requires a strategic twofold move: on the one hand, one needs a strong and comprehensive philosophical hypothesis about violence; on the other, it is necessary to bring to a theoretical unity the plurality or, to put it differently, the fragmentation of analyses consecrated to the issue of violence—and this result is achieved precisely thanks to a comprehensive philosophical hypothesis